Donald Rothberg, PhD, has practiced Insight Meditation since 1976, and has also received training in Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra practice and the Hakomi approach to body-based psychotherapy. Formerly on the faculties of the University of Kentucky, Kenyon College, and Saybrook Graduate School, he currently writes and teaches classes, groups and retreats on meditation, daily life practice, spirituality and psychology, and socially engaged Buddhism. An organizer, teacher, and former board member for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Donald has helped to guide three six-month to two-year training programs in socially engaged spirituality through Buddhist Peace Fellowship (the BASE Program), Saybrook (the Socially Engaged Spirituality Program), and Spirit Rock (the Path of Engagement Program). He is the author of
The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World
and the co-editor of Ken Wilber in
Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers.

We explore the important of generosity practice (including how it appears in different cultures), focusing on low it counteracts greed (especially), hatred and delusion. We suggest a number of practices for the next week.

After exploring the nature of Metta practice, we focus on how Metta practice increasingly helps us to meet each experience with our awakened hearts; develop in concentration, go through a kind of purification and integration of mind, heart and body; open to our heart's depth and bring our practice out into everyday life and the world.

Starting with the observation that often our ethical practice may be taken for granted, we look for ways to deepen our practice. We look to find our own personal ethical learning and practice, whether related to the individual, relational or social aspects of our ethical practice.

Continuing our exploration of ethical practice during earth care week. We examine, through the frame work of the Four Noble Truths, the question of the nature of climate change and how to respond as individuals, as communities, nationally and internationally.

We explore the meaning of ethical practice - its relationship to meditation and wisdom practice, how it is more a training than a following of external principles, how there are individual, relational, and social dimensions to our ethical practice, and how it can deepen for us. There's a brief overview of the five lay precepts and a taking of the precepts.